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Coping With Bad Habits

I’m sure I’m far from the only person to feel this way about themselves, but it’s getting worse lately.

We all have our traps, temptations we can’t avoid, distractions we can’t ignore, and like a large number of people, mine is the internet. Lately it’s been hampering my productivity, sucking away hours on end for no good reason. This was happening even before Samhain closed its doors.

For me it’s Facebook, email, forums… all the usual suspects. Facebook is the worst. I’ll walk away just to check ten minutes later to see if someone responded to something. GHAH!

Typically my way of dealing with such things is to not let it get a foothold in the first place. If the only thing I had to worry about was my writing, for example, I could just unplug the internet, right?

Wrong. The Catch-22 for me is, I NEED the internet. I do work for InkyKiss, and need to know as soon as something new pops up. I have to go on Facebook every day for social media work, as well as Instagram, Twitter and Tumblr. My phone is internet based, not cellular (to save money) so I can’t unplug the wifi for that reason either.

It’s the worst possible scenario, because I can’t completely cut myself off from the problem (my usual solution) and I have to actually use all the things I shouldn’t be every day–just long enough for it to sink its claws into me and drag me down the rabbit hole once more.

I feel it chipping away at my self-control every day, and it gets harder to pull out of it. Any suggestions on how to slap some sense into myself?

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This may not work for you but I use a separate laptop for writing that is not connected to the internet. It’s a tad inconvenient in that if I have to do research, I have to switch computers, but if I really want to focus, I close the internet-connected one and make myself stick to the “work” computer. Unfortunately, that one thing I had to research online often turns into full-out email, FB, Twitter “checking.”